Pat Buchanan?

Factual Questions
21

From http://www.mtsu.edu/~baustin/buchanan.html (which also has many quotes from Buchanan regarding blacks, immagrants, women, and Democracy):

ON JEWS:

 Buchanan referred to Capitol Hill as "Israeli-occupied territory."

(St. Louis Post Dispatch, 10/20/90)

 During the Gulf crisis: "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East -- the Israeli defense ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States." ("McLaughlin Group," 8/26/90)

 In a 1977 column, Buchanan said that despite Hitler's anti-Semitic and genocidal tendencies, he was "an individual of great courage...Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path." (The Guardian, 1/14/92)

 Writing of "group fantasies of martyrdom," Buchanan challenged the historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by diesel exhaust at Treblinka: "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody." (New Republic, 10/22/90) Buchanan's columns have run in the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight, the German-American National PAC newsletter and other publications that claim Nazi death camps are a Zionist concoction.

 Buchanan called for closing the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which prosecuted Nazi war criminals, because it was "running down 70-year-old camp guards." (New York Times, 4/21/87)

 Buchanan was vehement in pushing President Reagan -- despite protests -- to visit Germany's Bitburg cemetery, where Nazi SS troops were buried. At a White House meeting, Buchanan reportedly reminded Jewish leaders that they were "Americans first" -- and repeatedly scrawled the phrase "Succumbing to the pressure of the Jews" in his notebook. Buchanan was credited with crafting Ronald Reagan's line that the SS troops buried at Bitburg were "victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration

camps." (New York Times, 5/16/85; New Republic, 1/22/96)

 After Cardinal O'Connor criticized anti-Semitism during the controversy over construction of a convent near Auschwitz, Buchanan wrote:

“If U.S. Jewry takes the clucking appeasement of the Catholic cardinalate as indicative of our submission, it is mistaken. When Cardinal O’Connor of New York seeks to soothe the always irate Elie Wiesel by reassuring him
‘there are many Catholics who are anti-Semitic’…he speaks for himself. Be
not afraid, Your Eminence; just step aside, there are bishops and priests ready to assume the role of defender of the faith.” (New Republic, 10/22/90)

 The Buchanan '96 campaign's World Wide Web site included an article blaming the death of White House aide Vincent Foster on the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad -- and alleging that Foster and Hillary Clinton were Mossad spies. (The campaign removed the article after its existence was reported by a Jewish on-line news service; Jewish  Telegraphic Agency, 2/21/96.)

 In his September 1993 speech to the Christian Coalition, Buchanan declared: "Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free." (ADL

Report, 1994)

Of Hitler, he is also quoted as saying he was “an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War” and “a leader steeped in the history of Europe.”

I’m not Jewish, but Oy Gevalt! I would sooner elect Clinton for 4 more years than have this man speaking on behalf of our country. You think maybe I kid?

“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy

22

As to whether any of this makes Buchanan a Holocaust denier, I submit this excerpt of the definition of Holocaust denial from Robert Carroll’s Skeptic’s Dictionary www.skepdic.com :

The malicious treatment of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis is referred to as the Holocaust. It has become a symbol of evil in our times. Like many symbols, the Holocaust has become sacrosanct. To many people, both Jews and non-Jews, the Holocaust symbolizes the horror of genocide against the Jews. Some modern anti-Semites have found that attacking the Holocaust causes as much suffering to some Jews as attacking Jews themselves. The term for attacking any aspect of the symbology or mythology of the Holocaust is “Holocaust Denial”. It seems to be the main motivation for the Institute for Historical Review http://www.ihr.org/index.html and its Journal of Historical Review which since 1980 has been publishing articles attacking the accuracy of this or that claim about the Holocaust. Yes, one “historical” journal devoted almost exclusively to the issue of making the Holocaust seem like an exaggeration of biased historians. This institute was founded in 1978; it claims to be a “research, educational and publishing center devoted to truth and accuracy in history.” If truth and historical accuracy were the only goals of this group, I doubt that it would cause such an uproar. However, it seems that its promoters are more concerned with hatred than with truth. Thus, even those inaccuracies which they correctly identify are met with scorn and derision. For they never once deal with the central question of the Holocaust. They deal with numbers: were there six million or four million or ? Jews who died or were killed? They deal with technical issues: could this shower have been used as a gas chamber? Were these deaths due to natural causes or not? They deal with minor facts: did Hitler issue a Final Solution order or not? If so, where is it? What they do not deal with is the question of racial laws, of arresting and imprisoning millions of people in several countries for the crime of “race,” of herding people together like animals and transporting them to “camps” where millions died of disease, malnutrition, or were murdered. What the Holocaust deniers do not deal with is racial hatred. I do not wonder why. (emphasis added)

“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy

23

As a more trivial part of this thread, there is the fact that this fine law and order candidate was hauled downtown during his freshman year at Georgetown for assaulting two cops over a speeding ticket. (I’ve seen copies of the article and a couple attestations to that fact in a display at Lauinger Library [G-town’s campus libes] on “Georgetown in the Sixties”.)
That’s two things we have in common - our birthday (2 Nov) and our alma mater. Thank God that’s all. I think it’s too damn much, personally.

All Hail Unca Cecil, or the next best thing available!

24

Pat Buchanan grosses me out. Icky, icky, icky. I’m so glad I live up here in Canada, where the worst we have to deal with is Ernst Zundel. In his case, everyone knows he’s a crackpot.

25

I’m pretty vehemently anti-Buchanan (for most of the reasons stated in the posts above) but the one issue I wound up agreeing with him on was his taking George Bush to task for wanting to grant (or keep?) China’s Most Favored Nation status. He basically asked wh we should grant them MFN when they’ve got a horrible track record of human rights abuses- something we strongly consider when looking at the MFN status of most other countries. Whether this is an extension of his xenophobic “Us vs. Them” (Them= godless commies) or a truly moral stand I really can’t say. But its about the only thing I’ve agreed with him on.

Side note: My friend’s brother is a staunch Buchananite. He doesn’t believe in “Evil-lution” or “them scientists tryin’ to take your money” but he’ll lap up anything Falwell has to say.

26

Gr8Kat said:

Pulling out my copy of Lipstadt’s book (which I haven’t read yet, mind you, but it looks good on my bookshelf), I find:

P. 5-6: “Patrick Buchanan…used his widely syndicated column to express views that come straight from the scripts of Holocaust deniers. He argued that it was physically impossible for the gas chambers at Treblinka to have functioned as a killing apparatus because the diesel engines that powered it could not produce enough carbon monoxide to be lethal. Buchanan’s ‘proof’ was a 1988 incident in which ninety-seven passengers on a train in Washington, D.C., were stuck in a tunnel as the train emitted carbon monoxide fumes. Because the passengers were not harmed, Buchanan extrapolated that the victims in a gas chamber using carbon monoxide from diesel engines would also not have been harmed. He ignored the fact that the gassings at Treblinka took as long as half an hour and that the conditions created when people are jammed by the hundreds into small enclosures, as they were at Treblinka, are dramatically different from those experienced by a group of people sitting on a train. Asked where he obtained this information, Buchanan responded, ‘Somebody sent it to me.’ Buchanan has also referred to the ‘so-called Holocaust Survivor Syndrome.’ According to him, this involves ‘group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics.’* I am not suggesting that Patrick Buchanan is a Holocaust denier. He has never publicly claimed that the Holocaust is a hoax. However, his attacks on the credibility of survivors’ testimony are standard elements of Holocaust denial. Buchanan’s ready acceptance of this information and reliance on it to make his arguments are disturbing, for this is how elements of Holocaust denial find their way into the general culture. During the 1992 presidential campaign, when Buchanan was seeking the Republican nomination, he refused to retract these contentions. Nontheless few of his fellow journalists were willing to challenge him on the matter.”

“*Buchanan’s statements were made as part of his defense of John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto worker accused of being Ivan the Terrible, notorious camp guard and a mass murderer at Treblinka. It is not Buchanan’s defense of Demjanjuk with which I take issue–it is his use of denial arguments to do so. Buchanan has consistently opposed any prosecution of Nazi war criminals.”

“It’s a very dangerous thing to believe in nonsense.” – James Randi

27

Excellent research job from David. Thanks.

In the first couple of years after the invasion of Poland, the Nazis and their allies used mass shootings and gassing using diesel fumes to murder people. It wasn’t until about 1942 that they built the big death camps like Auschwitz to murder people using cyanide gas. Of course, there is no doubt that their murderous anti-Semitism went well back before that date…that’s just when the big death camps were built.

William F. Buckley wrote a book a couple of years ago called “In Search of Anti-Semitism”. In it he accused Buchanan, in a low-key way, of being unconsciously anti-Semitic. Buckley does not believe that Buchanan hates Jews as individual human beings, but he does think that based on Buchanan’s extensive statements on Israel and the Holocaust, something causes him to dislike Jews in the abstract. I respect Buckley as a decent person with generally good judgment, and I’m prepared to take his opinion seriously, especially when he breaks the Eleventh Commandment by doing it.

Don’t waste any sleep worrying over whether Buchanan is going to get elected President. It won’t happen.

Gr8Kat, I note you are extremely well-supplied with anti-Buchanan information. Hope your original post wasn’t a troll.

28

Lawrence said:

You’re quite welcome.

And my wife wonders why I keep all these books on my bookshelves. :wink:

“It’s a very dangerous thing to believe in nonsense.” – James Randi

29

Gosh, no. Like I said, I saw the way everyone’s posts were going and decided to do a little research on my own. I just plugged “Pat Buchanan” into a search engine and tried to read everything it gave me, pro and anti. I guess I was prejudiced when I began my search based on all the opinions of Buchanan that I’d already gathered, but the anti-Buchanan sites made a much bigger impression on me than the pro.

On a side note, I was highly amused that the search engine I used suggested I add, among other words, “delusional” to my search. Even the search engine doesn’t agree with the man :slight_smile:

“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy

30

Quayle is a better choice for Pres in 2000 than Buchanan. He is a better speaker:

“What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful.
How true that is.”
– Vice President Dan Quayle

“Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.”
– Vice President Dan Quayle